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Contract negotiations with longshoremen across the nation have broken down in the past week. Federal mediators seeking to avoid a walkout of thousands of East Coast and Gulf Coast dockworkers, from Massachusetts to Texas, have called a meeting of them and shipping companies. Terminal owners in the Pacific Northwest are considering a lockout and have replacement workers standing by to ensure grain exports to Asia.

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The clerical workers’ picket lines [ht: sm], which have shut down 10 of 14 terminals at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, are being honored by the 10,000-member International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 63, whose members work the docks.

The subject of the film is globalization and the sea, the ‘forgotten space’ of our modernity. Its premise is that the oceans remain the crucial space of globalization: nowhere else is the disorientation, violence and alienation of contemporary capitalism more manifest. But this truth is not self-evident and must be approached as a puzzle, or mystery; a problem to be solved. Sea trade is an integral component of the world-industrial system, but we are distracted from the full implications of this insight by two powerful myths. The first is that the sea is nothing more than a residual mercantilist space: a reservoir of cultural and economic anachronisms, relics of an older and obsolete economy—a world of decrepitude, rust and creaking cables, of the slow movement of heavy things. The second is that we live in a post-industrial society, that cybernetic systems and the service economy have radically marginalized the ‘old economy’ of heavy material fabrication and processing. Thus the fiction of obsolescence mobilizes reserves of sentimental longing for things which are not really dead.